After parting ways from its cowork segment, Greenville-based code school The Iron Yard Academy is on the fast track.
A year ago, the Iron Yard had four employees. Today, the code school and accelerator (which share a brand but are separate legal entities) has 45 full-time and around 30 part-time employees, according to Eric Dodds, The Iron Yard’s chief marketing officer. The Iron Yard opened 10 campuses in the last year, has four in the works and could have as many as 19 or 20 by 2016, he said.
Much of the growth has been because the company’s founders – Dodds, Peter Barth, Mason Stewart and John Saddington, according to its website – aren’t dividing their attention between different segments anymore, said Dodds.
“Originally we didn’t intend to expand the code school side of The Iron Yard,” he said. “We started the code school to train developers who could work at the startups that were going through our accelerator. … There’s a much larger pool of available talent in New York and San Francisco. … If you raise money and are looking to grow and hire lots of people, it can be challenging in the Southeast.”
Founded in 2012, The Iron Yard began in the NEXT Innovation Center as a startup accelerator under the care of then-Managing Director Peter Barth. The trifecta of the accelerator, the intensive code school and the coworking location were more cohesive in the beginning, and all essentially told the same story about Greenville. But in 2014, something changed, said Dodds.
“We had insane amount of demand in other cities in tech education. People really wanted us to expand our intensive code school, and so that part of the business really started to take off, to the point where it became an overwhelming majority of what the employees at The Iron Yard did,” he said. “It really monopolized our time in the best way possible. … It was just a natural time to say, ‘Hey, our team is working on growing this nationally, so we need to allow our team to focus on this 100 percent.’”
And so last year, the code school and accelerator moved away from cowork. While the code school and accelerator have never been the same company, Dodds says each segment still enjoys the benefits of a shared brand identity.
“Now the partners of The Iron Yard, the founders of the company are almost 100 percent focused on growing the code school,” said Dodds, noting that the legal break was mutually beneficial and allowed the segments to flourish independently. “We basically said, ‘Hey, this is a really great thing, but we’re trying to run this national school and it’s in neither of our best interest to run this single coworking location.”
The Iron Yard operates academies in Greenville, Charleston, Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, Houston, Orlando, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Columbia, Austin and Washington D.C., and will be officially launching four more – including Las Vegas, Little Rock, Ark., Nashville and Indianapolis – in the first half of 2015.
“We have a list of other cities that we are evaluating for the second half of the year,” said Dodds. “There’s huge gap between how people are being educated in technology and what people are required to know in tech jobs, and … that gap is growing bigger.”
Today, the coding school offers Web design, Python engineering, mobile engineering, Ruby on Rails engineering and front-end engineering, taught over the course of 12 weeks. Tuition is $12,000, though the school offers diversity scholarships and financing, and guarantees graduates job-searching services if they request.
“You learn a very tangible skill, and you can apply that directly to a job when you get out of the program,” Dodds said, noting many Iron Yard students are drawn to the simplicity of the concept. “It comes back to outcomes-based education.”
The Iron Yard Austin has branched out even farther than the original vision, partnering with IBM Design to provide students with a view of what established companies are working on in terms of user experience and interface design. IBM Design is also talking with The Iron Yard about its curriculum in an effort to improve the skills of tomorrow’s tech workforce.
“They are hosting our students and giving them exposure to the types of things they’re working on, and they’re also creating a hiring pipeline into their studio,” said Dodds. “They add a ton of value to our student experience, and on the IBM side, it gives them a great look at the talent coming up.”
This story has been amended to reflect that that the cowork segment has been separated from The Iron Yard, and that while the code school and accelerator segments are separate legal entities, the two share a brand and work closely in Greenville. Upstate Business Journal regrets the lack of clarity.
